Executive summary
When Six Flags and Cedar Fair merged in mid-2024, the newly combined entertainment giant brought together $3 billion of business but faced a critical challenge: how to unify their customer data and consolidate their marketing technology into a modern, standardized stack to support a more personalized, scalable guest experience. With over a decade-long relationship, Six Flags turned to Merkle to help them through this journey—beginning with the selection and implementation of Treasure Data’s Intelligent Customer Data Platform (CDP).
Six Flags Entertainment’s strategic goals for 2025 are to increase park attendance, boost per-visit spend, and deepen guest loyalty. To flawlessly execute these goals and capture share of wallet in the competitive family entertainment sector, Six Flags is focused on understanding its guests more comprehensively to help shape their park experiences in a fun and relevant way. Treasure Data plays a central role in achieving these aims by unifying Six Flags’ data and providing intelligent orchestration and scalable personalization.
Key highlights:
- Over $1 million in cost savings from tech consolidation
- Rapid implementation for Treasure Data, including Snowflake and Airship integration, in under 3 months
- Improved intelligent orchestration and scalable personalization capabilities
Treasure Data is accelerating our journey to become more sophisticated in delivering personalized, cross-channel experiences. Our partnership is much more than a vendor-client relationship — they are an extension of our team helping capture share of wallet in family entertainment.”
Challenges
The newly expanded Six Flags needed a plan to consolidate technology, optimize costs and reimagine their guest experience to prove value for consumers’ discretionary dollars.
CRM and data integration strategies across the enterprise were antiquated and struggled to provide the personalization today’s consumer expects. Lifting and shifting wouldn’t work – developing new strategies that work with a reimagined guest journey were essential.
Solution
RFP and POC
The RFP process included several contenders, but Treasure Data stood out—not for its flash, but for its substance. While the other vendors emphasized sleek interfaces, Treasure Data provided a user-friendly UI along with the advanced data science capabilities and scalability required to handle the complexity of Six Flags’ orchestration goals.
A proof of concept demonstrated Treasure Data’s ease of use with data ingestion from various sources and profile enrichments with strong identity resolution. The POC used Six Flags data to uncover insights on passholder and daily-ticket guest demographics and behaviors with regards to guest visits, in-park spend, and engagement.
The team was able to see the art of the possible and how marketers could turn those insights into orchestrated campaigns that drive profitability and post-park engagement, building deeper relationships with passholders and other guests.
Merkle also proved valuable at what Six Flags VP of Marketing Daryle Powers identified as a foundational requirement for this initiative to be successful – “the right humans running the big machines.” In partnership with Treasure Data, Merkle delivered an optimal org structure, key hires to make, and how to take a crawl-walk-run approach to deliver fast value and increase use cases over time.
Implementation
Treasure Data’s hybrid CDP architecture, enabling seamless integration with Snowflake’s data warehouse, also made it the ideal choice. This provided a flexible framework for driving increased attendance and in-park spend. The decision was also strategic: by decommissioning its duplicative marketing automation platforms, Six Flags could streamline operations and reinvest in smarter, more flexible marketing tools.
The first phase of implementation focused on transitioning legacy Six Flags off its marketing automation platform and into a new orchestration model using Treasure Data and Airship, a customer experience platform.
Despite a tight timeline and the holiday season, the team went live with the project in under three months. The result: a complete shutdown of a costly legacy marketing tool and a new, efficient pipeline from Snowflake to Treasure Data to Airship, empowering more robust and customer-informed strategies spanning data, orchestration, and activation.
Leveraging Treasure Data’s capabilities, including Customer Journey Orchestration, Segment Insights that deliver on-the-fly analysis of potential audience segments, and easy activation across a range of owned and paid channels, empowered marketers to harness Treasure Data for audience insights and campaign strategy with no coding expertise required.
Merkle is one of our strongest strategic partners and thought leaders, providing direction and support as we transform our business due to merger. They are essential to the success of our marketing and organizational future.”
Results
With the strategic guidance and expertise of Merkle and the capabilities of Treasure Data, Six Flags is reimagining how data is leveraged across the organization and laying the groundwork for scalable personalization. Migrating into a consolidated data structure empowers the company to connect the dots of guest interactions with powerful next-best-action experiences. Merkle and Treasure Data are all driving a new way of orchestrating and activating.
While Six Flags first used this tech implementation for simple tasks such as newsletters and surveys, it laid the foundation to support more sophisticated CX initiatives. The next phase of the implementation will migrate orchestration for legacy Cedar Fair customers to the new platform and redesign customer journeys from scratch for both legacy brands, introducing personalization for the new, integrated Six Flags brand.
By implementing Treasure Data CDP and connecting it directly to the Snowflake customer database, Merkle created a flexible foundation for processing and activating customer data that can evolve with shifting priorities and new martech solutions.
Future plans: AI and the future of the guest experience
Generative AI is on the horizon for Six Flags as they continue to define positioning and use cases for their business. The amusement park corporation will explore Treasure Data’s AI Agent Foundry capabilities—such as natural language querying and AI-driven campaign creation—in 2026.
Six Flags is laying the groundwork by organizing their assets and data structures to support smarter segmentation, more personalized experiences, and a shift toward customer-centric marketing that balances automation with emotional resonance.
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